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Book beginning: page 5

Explanation: what follows below are the quotations of Basil's theories throughout the novel, in listed form. They have been grouped together under suggested titles to make the information more manageable. The groups have been sorted according to how many characters share said groups, so that comparison is easier when scrolling through, i.e. a group title appearing in all three lists is at the top, and a group title appearing in only one list will be found towards the bottom. These group titles are only one way to consider the meaning of the quotations, and are by no means the correct or only way of interpreting them.

Each quote within a group has been ordered by page number, so that a character’s evolution can be more easily recognised. Some theories are said by one character but are actually originally the thoughts of another, in these cases, the quotation is under the original character and indicated as said by another.

Basil’s Theories

Conclusions of life

• There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction. […] The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. […] If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. (p7)
• I never tell people’s names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. (p7)
• The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. (p7)
• In such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them. (p110)
• Now that I have made [the confession], something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words. (p112)
• No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one. (p112)

“Man”

• Every gentleman is interested in his good name. […] Position and wealth are not everything. (p143)
• One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. (p145)

Sin

• One has to pay in other ways but money […] in remorse, in suffering, in… well, in the consciousness of degradation. (p76)
• Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. (p143)

The passing of time

• You call yesterday the past? (p105)

Artists

• Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. (p9)
• An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. (p14)
• To spiritualize one’s age – that it something worth doing. (p80)
• I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. (p111)
• It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. (p111)

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin Classics, 2009.